It has now been a little over two weeks since the Fallout series has been available in the Amazon Prime Video catalog. Certainly, the series was somewhat expected but it ultimately met with spectacular enthusiasm beyond expectations, so much so that even newbies to the franchise became interested in it. Beyond a fairly impressive word of mouth which offered even more visibility to the show, an explosion in attendance at the license’s video games also occurred. What if the success of the Fallout series was about to mark the beginning of a new mainstream strategy for video games?
The Fallout series on Amazon is the textbook case of the link between cinema and video games
For a very long time, the cinematographic sector did not necessarily push video games to the top. From now on, there are quite a few names on the list of feature films judged to be the worst video game adaptations : Super Mario Bros. (1993), Alone in the Dark (2005), Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, Double Dragon (1994), Resident Evil: Afterlife and many others. Ultimately, we realize that catastrophic or, at best, dispensable adaptations have never really ceased to exist. Fortunately, the scales are becoming more and more balanced and we can even imagine, given certain recent successes, that the trend is very clearly reversing.. One of the most concrete and current examples that we can provide is obviously the series fallout on the Amazon Prime Video platform.
Popular everywhere on the web, garnering up to 93% and 89% of recommendations (press and public), series fallout is the perfect case study to illustrate this powerful cross-media link that is being created between video game adaptations, on the one hand, and the licenses from which they are inspired, on the other. In the case of fallout, many spectators felt the desire to take an interest in the numerous video games released since the first part. Moreover, these are not isolated cases since within the editorial staff, we were also able to experience this sensation. Ultimately, the influx of players was even greater than we could have imagined since, according to the official Fallout account on the social network fallout.
As it turns out, Bethesda was rather smart about this, because it wasn’t just the series itself that played a driving role in this resurgence in popularity. Commercial offers also had a significant impact. As it happens, a free trial offer for Fallout 76 coincided perfectly with the release of the Amazon series, and it actually succeeded since it is estimated that a million players have been tempted ! Conversely, other players even invested part of their money, at the risk of being disappointed, in purchasing one of the games. While the news and the calendar are somewhat saturated with repeated big releases (FF7 Rebirth, Dragon’s Dogma 2, Rise of the Ronin…), Fallout 4 makes a breakthrough in the Steam bestseller rankings.
Faced with this observation, we can wonder if more and more big names in video games (manufacturers, publishers, studios) will not want to try the experience with one of their licenses in the hope of reproducing a similar feat. It’s a possibility but this cross-media strategy is not really an exact science as it has proven that it is not necessarily efficient every time.. To realize this, we can study several examples which have proven themselves or not, and we quickly realize that there is already a factor of aura and notoriety that comes into play. Firstly, let’s dig in and take a look at CD Projekt Red’s catalog, including the scores of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt and of Cyberpunk 2077. In the case of Geralt’s adventures, there was indeed an influence from the Netflix release.
Whether in December 2019 and 2021, the two seasons of the Netflix series had a real impact on the attendance figures for the third opus : a peak at 103,329 players (recorded in January 2020, the biggest peak of players in the game!) for season 1, a peak at 78,592 players (recorded in January 2022). Even the spin-off series, Blood Legacy (Blood Originin VO) allowed The Witcher 3 to experience another surge in popularity with a peak of 89,451 players (recorded in December 2022). It will therefore be necessary to monitor developments with the launch of season 3 of The Witcherbut we already feel that the excitement is also due to the unprecedented nature of the adaptation. For Cyberpunk 2077it’s a bit of the same story. Within a month, the release of the animated series Cyberpunk Edgerunners allowed the CD Projekt game to multiply its number of active players by 7, going from 18,835 to 136,724 players.
Of course, the figures mentioned come from the PC games market but these phenomena also occurred for games planned for home consoles. More than a year ago, for the release of the series The Last of Us from HBO (broadcast on Prime Video), the original game’s sales scores exploded on PlayStation 4 and 5. A few months later, Nintendo also welcomes the impact of Super Mario Bros. The film on the increase in sales of Mario games between April 2023 (month of film release) and September 2023 (end of the second financial quarter), significantly higher from one year to the next. Ultimately, when we look at these phenomena, we realize that they are above all punctual. Sometimes, the average scores are more positive over time than before broadcast but we notice that they inevitably collapse, demonstrating that films and series do not establish a lasting trend. In fact, the more we study this phenomenon, the more we realize that many factors and counter-arguments to this strategypresupposedly virtuous, come into play and there is no real guarantee.
Popularity and the public, a science and a subject much more complex than one might believe
Many called but few chosen. This is what we see quite a bit when we take a look at all the film and series projects adapted from video games, and this is what makes us say that we should not believe that it is enough to carry out a side project to allow a license to benefit from a second wind. On the one hand, this would amount, among other things, to obscuring the work of developers who, through their actions alone, are capable of reversing a trend. It is true that Cyberpunk Edgerunners did good to Cyberpunk 2077 but nothing beats the renewal offered by the extension Phantom Liberty and version 2.0. Since release, the player average is much higher than before. On the other hand, the cross-media strategy has not always paid off, for several reasons.
Already from one, there is the attractiveness of the project to take into account. Sometimes it’s a trendy type of production or a project where we can be sure that the people involved are a guarantee of quality (Jonathan Nolan for falloutCraig Mazin for The Last of Us to recite nobody else but them). Second, there is the aura of the universe from which the project is extracted and, above all, his ability to speak to the general public. Has there really been a new impetus for the games in the series Uncharted during the release of Ruben Fleischer’s film, for the Halo games following the launch of the first season of the Paramount+ series, for Sonic And Gran Turismo in reaction to feature films shown in cinemas? Well, not necessarily. Again, it’s hard to predict these kinds of things. Conversely, Granblue Fantasy: Relink had no trouble getting established in the Western video game landscape – which is already a great achievement, with more than 800,000 copies outside of Japanese soil – without necessarily having to insistently direct players towards the animated series (which was partly made available on the Cygames YouTube channel).
We cited it when we talked about the guarantee of quality, but there is also a snowball effect caused by the prescribing effect that emerges through the publication of reviews on the web. One thing leads to another, a very positive review will have an easier chance of awakening the public’s interest, even if this in no way guarantees that, subsequently, a spectator will turn into a player. What greatly helps the process is the fact that video games are now integrated into a very broad entertainment ecosystem and that they maintain very porous borders with other cultural objects (literature, pop-culture, manga/anime), including cinema, and that it is easier to move from one to the other, to build bridges. And then, for those less familiar with the world of video games, a film or series remains a more accessible, less expensive and time-consuming entry point (the viewing time of a series is not the same as the lifespan of a game). In this type of case, if the spectator allows himself to be convinced, it is because he is more attracted by the universe and the scenario than by the other qualities that a player looks for in a video game, like the gameplay. Conversely, a player who knows a franchise but does not appreciate its video game arguments will tend to enjoy the series and leave it there.
In a sense, a cross-media project, more oriented towards cinema, is sometimes a great asset to play for certain video game players since it allows them to to open the door to a wider audience, and we know that video games continue to become more popular over the years and decades. However, we must not believe that this is a one-way link, or even an advantage.and we have an example that couldn’t be more telling, namely the film Dungeons & Dragons: Thieves’ Honor. Unfortunately, when it was released in theaters, the feature film did not have the expected effect at the box office. But what would have happened if he had followed suit at the launch of Baldur’s Gate 3 ? These are just guesses but when we see the general enthusiasm that there has been and still is for the Larian Studios title, we say to ourselves that the film could have been much more popular thanks to this RPG monument. In any case, it will be necessary to check whether this El Dorado is tangible or is only an illusion in the coming years, and it will be particularly interesting when we know that some big fish are about to try this strategySony in the lead with God of Waron the Amazon side, and Horizonon the Netflix side.